Jacob Kobina Ayiah Mensah

Jacob Kobina Ayiah Mensah Poems

The Best Poem Of Jacob Kobina Ayiah Mensah

Mozambique

You were not here but you heard it,
You heard the water, boiling over the hilltops,
Roaring in your ears, far deep in sleep,
Because, the windows of this house were opened.
But, it is still raining here than before;
And if I look, through this open window,
Through the rain, I can see how River Limpopo
Is growing larger and fatter, and what I see again
Is more than those established roots of the past
And individuals who are living
In their own time in the waters,
The waters are streaming
From another form of the mangroves,
Growing in the white clay, Maputo is sinking
In these waters, on the bark of relief.
Can you clothe yourself in Chimoio cotton
When the day is still cold?
Although it is afternoon here but the weather,
That of morning winter,
You have travelled from a long journey
On the Moatize-songo road
I do not know whether there is Quelimne for a tea
In the open cupboard.
But there are grape fruits
And oranges to expand their development,
Our dependence on physical growth, becoming
Rotting souls on the banks of Zambezi river.
Mozambique in waters, and the child
Who was born in a tree which was made
For media for providing pure drinking water
Across Africa which soon became sewage
In this country, I see a tree of life.
If you look back, it looks as if anything
Had happened here, because the rocks
In the waters are glittering in the sun.
Please, do not close the window,
I know how the wind blows the rains in here,
Sit down and finish this cooked rice and herbs soup,
The visitors are waiting for us in the reception room.
You hear what the old man is saying,
“Oh, my heroes and heroines are not
Those who carry guns but those who carry
Their daily life in the face of war, ”
Are the strength of this landscape,
The sun which has been hidden for so long
In the clouds black as the kitchen smoke,
Is raising, and you these children
Will be the first to eat the rice growing in the waters.
Once the land was redness in the heart,
For the washed feet in the lost inhabitants,
Our rural community became metaphor of dreams,
Because the sunstroke attracted dazed culture,
There was relationship between
The artist and his community,
This recurring possession leaving blue
Of perspective images behind the noisy village marketplace.
Oh? Do you want to remind me of the Pompeians,
Who are still living in the volcano eruption?
Once hurricane nearly swallowed our womb,
With unwashed mouth kisses on the cheekbone,
I nearly lost my breath,
Because the smell was the chocked gutters,
You accepted the book on the ocean
Because it contained blue ashes made of the shells,
I uplifted the sacred memories, erasing
The names of absent heroes for the fish men,
Our real historians, the green bottles sank,
The kitchen smoke, coiled below the knee,
For that map sketched for our roots,
The amber of once lost island,
You recovered as a husband
Without seasons, but with registered verse
For the sea.
And now that you are sick walking with mythological light,
Can you identify a nurse without in her uniform?
The sepulchral villages are my symbols,
Representing the society,
My vision declines,
Falling into the rains,
That is why you have not missed your cosmos,
Your bulwark, my waterfall that nearly
Buried me with the frozen world.
There are no images for the deaths,
We know only migration, stepping in the room,
Where reviewers sit and talk of apparitions
From Greek mythology with sea blast,
I compress every meaning into one word,
That defines our community.
The ghosts have survived
The nineteenth century missing world,
With no genealogical feet, the roots
Of ancestors, a shadow, lengthening
Into the swamp with a change of merge,
The knots on the edge of this mountain,
You see from committing inner suicide,
My explanation to your angry you felt,
When all the passengers were looking at you.
But this November month
Is not good for subscription
Of poems in the waters
Which run beneath us, for I hear your soft voice
Coming from the divided soul.
I have prepared the evening table
For the broken memories
With white foam in the mouth,
Bubbling out from the sea.
And the odour bodies of this room,
That have created your music
With one stringed instruments,
Because you hate architecture
Of antique hand, are haunting,
Haunting for a shore to anchor the boat,
Carrying fables, which are so dirty
Because of lost of memory,
I have held the bark of a tall iroko tree,
You cannot climb this shadow ladder behind
With the lantern that smokes,
Because, the tide is ebbing, howling,
But this is all that we yearn here,
That is why we are more spoilt
Than Caravaggoi, Jean Genet
And the tortured drunken Francis Bacon.
Oh, good that these shadows are our shelter
For us to hide our wasted life,
We continue with our other life.
And you say I should give these children
Gulliver’s Travels to read?
Do not laugh at me, when the water fills
Like a peacock fans under this rock,
Let the empty cans from the tourists’ hands
Become the bellies for these children
Because I have married twice, the first ended
In the blue horizon, and now
This in poetry, I climb the hills,
I can see the village, the fisherman is going homeward,
We walk under the ghost palm trees,
Because we are to build after every rain
With our keys which have fallen
Into the hands of the strangers on the beds
Of these waters. That is why we grow rice
In these waters when it is still raining
Although we have been awoken in our long sleep,
For the dead memories buried in us.
Mozambique in waters, and the faces
Of the children are innocent, whitening
In this late morning sun in the dark sky.

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